Months into a service design and documentation process, I sat in a Teams call filled with dashboards showing user behavior, conversion funnels, and engagement metrics. We had more data than ever, yet the team kept asking the same question: “Who exactly are we building this for?”

This isn’t uncommon. Digital products create an empathy gap that traditional businesses rarely face.

Digital Products Make Customers Invisible

When customers interact with physical stores, their faces, frustrations, and preferences are visible. Digital products strip away these human cues, leaving us with fragmented data points that obscure rather than illuminate who we’re serving.

Two forces make this invisibility particularly challenging:

Anonymous interactions dominate. Many users never log in, browse across devices, block cookies or other tracking technologies, or use multiple accounts. You’re trying to understand someone you can’t consistently identify.

Data fragments across systems. Research shows that 37% of data leaders spend most of their time wrestling with complexity rather than extracting insights. Customer information scatters across platforms, making unified views nearly impossible.

So most organizations chase “consistent experiences” across all channels. But what if that’s backwards?

The Banking Breakthrough That Changes Everything

Watch what actually happens when people manage money. While 55% use mobile as their primary banking method, something fascinating occurs with complex tasks: 50% still prefer branches for financial advice.

The pattern extends beyond banking. Think about your own behavior: you’ll research products on your phone during lunch but switch to your laptop for the actual purchase with multiple tabs and comparison spreadsheets. Form factor, cognitive load, and emotional stakes all influence channel choice.

This isn’t about “omnichannel consistency.” It’s about contextual intelligence.

Building Empathy Around Context, Not Consistency

Start with continuous discovery. The most empathetic teams treat customer conversations as ongoing operations, not quarterly projects. Weekly interviews build the muscle memory you need when dashboards can’t show facial expressions.

Connect fragments strategically. Organizations with mature data management generate 250% more business value. Success isn’t collecting more data—it’s understanding the why behind behavioral patterns.

Design for intelligence, not uniformity. Canva’s breakthrough came from recognizing that non-designers needed fundamentally different tools than professionals. This insight led to 220 million users and proves that companies excelling at contextual personalization generate 40% more revenue.

The empathy gap isn’t that we can’t see our customers—it’s that we’re looking for the wrong patterns.

What assumption about “consistent experience” could you challenge this week?